War
That was a very stressful time for all of us, as it was for all Kosovars, it was the same for my family and me. At that time, I mean, activism continued in ‘98, at the beginning of ‘99. In February, around the end of February ’99, we started becoming scarce, we started not meeting as much with the members of the Red Cross and the Emergency Staff, because we used to meet. And those connections started to be interrupted and we started locking up in our apartments, in our homes. Some other relatives who thought that they would be safe in Pristina for some reason came and stayed in our apartment. And people started locking up at home, stores started getting broken into, windows, and Serbs started taking things from stores, because Albanians didn’t dare go outside. I mean, my apartment was in the center and we didn’t dare leave the house.
We prepared food at home, but apart from this, even our telephone lines – and this seemed very interesting and impossible to me, but it turns out it is possible – the telephone lines of Albanians were cut off, whereas those of Serbs remained functional. I thought that the telephone lines were cut because of the situation, but no, Serbs had telephone service, and we couldn’t communicate with anyone. I saw this, I noticed this because our close neighbor bought an apartment from a Serb, and at her place the phone was functional, because the apartment was under the name of a Serb. And with these communication cuts, I didn’t know where my father was, where my brother was, where their children were. And one day, I called my aunt in Skopje from my neighbor’s telephone, and they told me that my brother and his family and my father went to Skopje. They waited a long time at the border, but they managed to get out. But we didn’t want to leave Pristina, to leave Kosovo, we hadn’t done anything, we wanted to stay in our apartment.
However, from the apartment… in our building every floor has five apartments, and it is twelve floors, meaning 120 families lived there. Out of all of the families, only 14 Albanian families remained in that building. And one day, our closest Serb neighbor came and knocked on the door and asked for my husband and they talked. He said to him, “Can you please, can we agree that if you are in danger, I will protect your family because I see you have many members there. But if we’re in danger, can you then protect us from any possible danger?” “Yes,” we said, “But can you please let us call our relatives to see where they are?” And he said, “OK, take the key, you can talk on the phone, use the phone.” And when I went in there I talked to my brother again and he said, “Take clothes, because it’s very cold, you’re going to wait at the border for a long time.” And OK, we agreed on that, when I looked at the balcony I saw a sniper gun and a bag filled with bullets, I mean, that neighbor had them.
Then, all the neighbors started, the Serb men and boys [started] wearing army uniforms, and on 4 April, on 4 April they made all of us, in ’99, leave our apartment. And those four families too, the four apartments that were Albanian, we were forced to leave the apartment. And the children were small. So, we looked to take, to take elementary, necessary things, and we left the apartment. But where to go? We saw the river of people, a river of people going towards the train with clothes bundled up in tablecloths. And the police said to us, “Go there where the train is, to the tracks near Dragodan.” We got on the train there and the train stopped in Blace[1] and we got off the train. They ordered us not to walk off the tracks, and only on the rails, because they said it was mined. “You can’t get off the train tracks. Go straight on the tracks, until the Blace border.”
I remember that it was incredibly cold, 4 April 1999, incredibly cold, very, very cold. And, when we got there, those of us who got off the train got there. Many people who’d gotten to the border earlier were waiting there, and they were black in the face {touches face}, like with ash or with…because of the factory that was there. And, they waited for us, on the left side we had the police, on the right and in front of us many Albanians who were placed in Blace. And the police on the other side yelled at someone, I don’t know why, “Dodji vamo!”[Come here!], and he shot at him. My husband was in front there, as well as my daughter, my young daughter and he protected her {holds her wrist} to prevent something from happening to her. But luckily that didn’t happen, the bullet didn’t hit anyone, but it was a very traumatic experience for us.
It started getting dark there, it started getting cold and when it became completely dark, the villages around Blace started massively sending different material, all sorts of rags for people to cover themselves with, so they wouldn’t freeze. Then bread, then milk, then…foodstuff to pass the night as well as possible. But in reality it was very difficult. The next day, around two, we were…because it was like a field there, Blace. We joined the road, we joined the column, the column lasted 15 hours, I mean, from two in the afternoon in April ‘99. We, at two in the morning, no actually at five in the morning, we made it to the border. You know the border there is very short, that part is very short {shows the distance with her hands}, a few meters. But we spent 15 hours in that part. There were that many people, and the border police let people pass the Macedonian border that slowly. And at a certain moment, they separated our family, they said, “You pass {gestures with hands}, you stay.” And I started to plead with that border guard, I said, “Please you can you let them go because my brother-in-law is there {gestures direction}, his wife is there, and the children…” Very aggressively he said, “Go, go pass.” I mean, no one deserved that behavior of his.
And we got on buses, we didn’t know where we were going, or where they were taking us. It so happened that they sent us to the Stankovec camp. They’d already put up white tents, thin ones, and our whole family was placed in one tent. I mean, it was our nuclear family with five members, two brothers in law with their wives and their families, their children, and other family members, the children of my husband’s aunt were there. I mean, there were several of us placed in one tent. And we didn’t…then the offices opened up there to leave [the camp]. Meanwhile, you couldn’t get out to Skopje, because around the camp, inside around the camp and beyond the bars of the camp there were Macedonian soldiers. I mean, you couldn’t get out, it seems they were afraid of the ethnic breakdown that would be caused in Macedonia if Albanians from Kosovo continued living in Macedonia. And you couldn’t get out, you had to stay there or emigrate to different countries in Europe or America. But since that wasn’t our aim, we stayed there for about two weeks.
And one day a Macedonian activist arrived in the camp. She was Savka, Savka Todorovska, she was the leader, the director of the Macedonian Women’s Network, I didn’t know that. But my husband had worked on a small job with her husband, by chance. And when her husband found out we were in the camp, he was very sick, and he was in the hospital, and he couldn’t come there to visit us, but he pleaded with his wife, “Please go because they’re people, they’re people like us.” That’s what she said he said to her (smiles). “They’re people like us and they don’t deserve that kind of situation.” And that Savka came and found the tent we were in. And she introduced herself, she said I’m this person, she had brought some things for the children. And I begged her to get us out of the camp, to get us out of the camp because I had an aunt in Skopje, and my aunt and her husband’s family had ensured their apartments for us, they had left their own homes, they had set aside their own rooms for us so that we could go and stay there.
I mean, I left the camp, I went to my aunt’s and Savka helped me get my relatives out as well, because you had to knock on many doors in order to get permission to leave the camp. The Red Cross I don’t know, the Ministry of…I don’t know where she didn’t knock on in order to get us permission to leave the camp. We settled in Skopje, we were three families in one apartment, three families in one apartment, three rooms, three families. I continued with Savka, I became engaged. Savka said to me, “What did you do? What was your job?” I told her, I said, “I was an activist, I did humanitarian volunteer work with women and children.” She said, “Yes, OK, do you want to get involved? Because some women from Bosnia, Croatia, they’re asking about you, what position are you in.” I was happy and I went to her office right away. Many women from Sweden had come, Kristin Berger had come, I met with Kristin Gerberg for the first time – the director of the Women for Women foundation, Kvinna til Kvinna from Sweden. Nuna Zvizdić from Bosnia had come because they’d lived through the experience we were going through at the time, and other activists.
Then, a woman activist from Tetovo, Miki Emerus, came often trying to reach an agreement on what to do and how. And they said, “Tomorrow we’re going to meet with an activist from Kosovo, will you come as well?” I said, “Yes, who is she?” “Igballe [Igo] Rogova.” And we went there the next day, it was a park. I waited for Igo with Nuna, we met with Igo. And Igo had brought with herself, a kind of…with herself, a few bags with notebooks, with pens, with colors I think, and she said, “I brought these for the camp.” “For where?” “For the camp in Çegran.” OK, I was happy that I met her because I’d heard a lot about her, but I hadn’t had a chance to meet her. And from that day onwards, we met up everyday with some activists at Hotel Evropa, I mean we met outside and we went to the Çegran camp. Igo had a very good program that she ran with different activists. I know Iliriana was there, Iliriana Loxha, because that camp was open. And there, in order to prevent negative phenomena, quite a rich program was run to raise awareness. There were many journalists who came from different countries to describe the situation as it was.
And after that…we started, what could we do further, we got a room for rent and called it Dera e Hapur for refugee women, I mean, women who were from the camp, and placed with various families in Skopje. And from that time, I mean,‘99 to the present, the Dera e Hapur women’s center that we founded with the activists is still functional.
Trafficking was a reality then {drinks water}. In order to prevent this phenomenon, different awareness raising activities were run with artists, language courses, and other activities. Igo with Motrat Qiriazi, developed many different activities at that time in the camp, the Çegran camp. To go back to the room that was called Dera e Hapur, there we thought about what would be good for women to do. We started psychosocial activities, because women needed psychological support to talk about the traumatic experiences they had at the time. Then, something else that was necessary, medical care was necessary, primary care, because women’s health was quite poor at the time, but also women’s rights because Macedonia at that time adapted its laws in order not to give you rights as a refugees, not to have the right to have any rights.
So, we set these three objectives for ourselves and we met every Tuesday and every Wednesday. It’s interesting because even after so many years, even after all these years, after 16 years we meet on Tuesdays and Wednesday for psychosocial workshops, and creative-relaxing as we called them in the center we now have in Pristina. So, we continued these activities until the end of October ’99, even though my family returned to Pristina because of the entry of NATO, I mean, on 12 June, and my family on 13-14 June came one by one, but I continued to work at the center. I would come on the weekends to Pristina, during the working week I would work with women. Then, in conversation with Kerstin Gerberg, I said, “But these women will also need these activities in Pristina. What to do?” She said, “In November and December go to Pristina and prepare the place, find the place and prepare what you want to do there.” And that’s what happened, in November and December ‘99 I came to Pristina, I found the location, an apartment approximately 70 square meters. I wrote the project, I mean I wrote the project with a pen and a candle, because there wasn’t electricity, it was a very difficult situation, life was difficult in Kosovo after the war, and that first winter was incredibly hard, it was very cold. We didn’t have a computer, and we didn’t know how to write, we didn’t know how to write projects because in university we didn’t have a subject that would teach you how to do something like that, but I wrote it like that, thinking how to put women’s needs on paper, I mean, to put on paper what they needed.
And those activists from Kvinna til Kvinna came from Sweden, and when I came to Pristina I crossed the border from Macedonia for the first time together with those activists from Kvinna til Kvinna. And we agreed on what the project proposed and they immediately accepted it, so on 1 January 2000 we started the women’s center Dera e Hapur in Pristina, in Dardania, in a location we identified as appropriate for us. And women started, those women who initially were refugees there, they started coming to the center.
